We’ve been shipping jobs and ideas offshore for longer than you might think. Some classic examples of technology management failure in this IEEE history article: How RCA Lost the LCD - IEEE Spectrum
“There were great pressures within RCA stemming from a 1969 order to make computing the company’s main strategic priority. That edict came from RCA’s CEO (and later chairman) Robert W. Sarnoff, who had succeeded his legendary father, David. RCA had been designing and selling its own computers since the early 1950s, and its Spectra 70 systems were for a time competitive with IBM mainframes. Sarnoff’s new strategy spurred a rapid expansion of computer-related projects; in Princeton nearly half the staff was drafted into computer research. Though he harbored no illusions of outselling IBM, Sarnoff vowed his firm would become the nation’s No. 2 computer maker.” This is a dead giveaway that I’m older than dirt because RCA was my employer when this strategy was implemented. It was good for me because I was a new engineer in the computer division. LCDs are now everywhere, and nobody remembers that RCA Spectra-70 & 7 series were clones of the IBM 360 & 370 mainframes. UNISYS was the eventual name of all the merged ex-Sperry-Rand/UNIVAC-RCA-Burroughs-etc. computer divisions, and I moved on to the petro-chemical automation world.
